To Protect the One She Loved
by Valie
Summary: Julia's POV. The whole time she loved Spike, Julia did anything she could to protect him.


**Pairing:** Julia/Spike  
><strong><strong>Prompt:<strong> **unfinished endings - the shorter story / no love / no glory / no hero in her sky  
><strong>Warnings:<strong> Angst, dark!fic, character death, spoilers for anime  
><strong>Word count:<strong> 1,039

**A/N:** Wow, haven't written CB fanfiction in years (and actually, I wrote this two years ago *fail*)! I took three particular moments you see in the anime and elaborated on them, showing them from Julia's perspective (since we mostly see Spike's in the anime) and voila! Enjoy. *offers tissues*

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><p><strong>To Protect the One She Loved<strong>

Carefully, Julia bandaged the injured man's body, her fingers moving delicately against Spike's torn body. Spike murmured in his sleep once but was otherwise silent as she worked on cleaning and treating his wounds. The blonde touched Spike as if he were made of glass, fragile and able to break at any moment. Double checking the bandages around his chest and side where the bleeding was still the heaviest, Julia couldn't help but see Spike as anything else, at least at the moment. She knew he was strong, but he was only a human being - breakable and easily expendable.

"You're a fool," she whispered to herself as she brushed green hair away from a pale forehead.

The simple gesture made her uneasy even though her body ached for Spike inside her, wanting him to fan the inferno only he could create within her. Feeling guilty for her thoughts, she quickly finished her tending and took the seat at the foot of the bed. Julia was Vicious' girl, but it was hard to remember that sometimes when Spike was near. Sighing, Julia looked away from the source of her temptation and out the window. She loved both men deeply but Vicious had changed, growing hungry for power as he rose in the Syndicate's ranks. The man he was becoming and the man she had fallen in love with were two different people now - one a pale shadow of the other.

Spike wasn't like that though. He hadn't changed once in all the time she'd known him. Julia would have loved him for just that fact if there were no others, but there were other reasons she loved him and they all made it harder for her. Vicious would never give her up and while Spike foolishly tempted fate, she couldn't put him in danger. Julia loved Spike far too much for that. So while she was forced to remain with an increasingly becoming mad man, her heart belonged to the one person who couldn't have it, not without facing an undeserved death. Picking up a book to read, Julia hummed. She hummed to calm her mind, selfishly praying that Spike would stay sleeping forever. Things would be so much easier that way.

x-x

It was always hard to keep the lies she told realistic when she spoke to Vicious. He could sense a lie from a mile away, making it even more of a task to tell believable lies. Still, Julia should have known that just because her lies were plausible, they didn't make Vicious any less paranoid. It was only a matter of time before he realized what her and Spike had been up to. Only a matter of time before he would intervene with their plans.

She held on tightly to the small card Spike had left behind, seeking some vague sense of salvation in it's words. Vicious' message was shorter and made more of an impact - kill Spike or be killed. When the man who had first won her heart left, the rain falling steadily outside her window, she tore Spike's words to pieces. Not out of fear, but out of love. Going to the window and dropping the pieces out into the rain, she did it to protect Spike. If she let him go now, then he would be safe.

Or at least that's what she thought at the time.

Spike had promised her freedom, but she was eternally bound by chains much too heavy to lift.

x-x

Years later, when she found herself in Spike's presence once again, it opened all her old wounds. The ones she had bound tightly with invisible bandages to keep her sanity. To see that he was the same person, eased her mind though. She felt, despite everything she'd been running from and once feared, that they could pick up where they left off. Run away like Spike had wanted to once so long ago. Then the bullets began to fly and they were running and fighting for their lives, together. Jumping from the fire escape onto the roof, freedom so close at hand, Julia could actually picture it. It was the happiest she'd been since the day she first met Spike.

Pain blossomed in her back, the gunshot ringing in her ears, and she was falling. Falling away from freedom. Falling away from a happy ending. Falling into oblivion, black and cold. Spike turned her so she faced the sky, holding her like it was the last time he would, because they both knew it was. So many things passed through her mind as she lay dying, realizing that her life was filled with unfinished endings. She couldn't even finish protecting Spike from heartache as she watched tears glisten in his eyes. Dying would be the only thing she would complete, the irony was that it would be the last thing she did. As she laid in Spike's arms looking up at both him and the infinite sky beyond him, taking in as much of both as she could, she realized so many truths that had eluded her before.

There would be no glory in her death. She was going to die escaping a past she'd been running from for far too long.

There would be no love waiting for her on the otherside, if one existed. Spike would still be trapped in this world, neither would ever be with the other - not even in the otherside.

There was no hero in her sky, one that would heal her and take her away from all of this. Only death waited to take her away, ripping her so cruelly from the only person she had left.

Tears filled her eyes as she remembered the moments she'd had with Spike when she was still young and naive. When freedom was an actual possibility and the chains that bound her to her life were loose enough to slip through. Her fingers ached to reach up and touch Spike's face wanting to protect him even still, but she was beyond such things as her body grew colder. The best she could manage were whispered words before shutting her eyes and letting death take her away.

_"It's all a dream."_

**-End-**


End file.
